In order to get the gist of the book, you only need to see this
one quote from the introduction:

The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate
profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and
men.

So, there's your controversy.

Harding's article quotes an NYU economist in her article:

“Dr Kim would be the first
World
Bank president ever who seems to be anti-growth,” said
William
Easterly, professor of economics at New York
University. “Even the severest of World Bank critics like me
think that economic growth is what we want.”

Obviously, context is everything. From Harding's article:

But colleagues of Dr Kim and officials at the US Treasury said
that when taken in context he was simply arguing that the
distribution of gains from economic growth decides whether it
makes life better for the poorest. They pointed out that
such criticisms were widespread in the late 1990s and the World
Bank had since changed its practices to take account of them.

Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here. And that
lesson is that GDP growth isn't everything.

Let's consider our own recovery for a moment.

As
Modeled Behavior's Karl Smith puts it, we seem to be
experiencing a
"GDP-less recovery": a recovery marked by strong job growth,
anemic GDP, and flattening corporate profits. This is a
play on the popular "jobless recovery" theme, which was used to
describe the phase of the recovery where GDP and corporate
profits soared as the labor market went nowhere.

One wonders what would be the better world. One where most people
are working and GDP growth is relatively slow? Or one where GDP
is surging while employment rates drop and poverty rises?